US: Again strong labour market report – Nordea Markets

Anders Svendsen, analyst at Nordea Markets, suggests that today’s strong US NFP reading makes it hard to become more negative on the labour market as the Nonfarm payrolls increased by 304k in January while revisions to the last two readings amounted to -70k.

Key Quotes

“In total, somewhat stronger than consensus expectations at 165k.”

“The unemployment rate didn’t rise nearly as much as feared. The government shutdown was supposed to affect the unemployment rate but not the nonfarm payrolls to the same extent.”

“The unemployment rate only rose to 4.0% from 3.9%, while the broad unemployment rate increased a lot to 8.1% from 7.6% and average hourly earnings only rose 0.1% m/m after 0.4% m/m in December.”